Mary Bannister (MaryB)

This is a real shame.

Ooh I loved Happy Valley but never saw the final season. Maybe I should subscribe to Acorn or Britbox, whichever has it.

Agreed. Never, ever, again.

Wow. With Hayley Mills guest starring. There’s a name from the past.

I felt manipulated by Eliot, I never knew if I was getting the true voice of the main characters. Which was a big reason MM didn’t work for me. I don’t feel manipulated by Wharton although of course I am. Maybe it’s the biting humor.

I haven’t read it before. I don‘t particularly “like” him (as in, I wouldn’t want him around IRL) but I find him interesting. I want to know what happens to him.

The fact that he even considers the idea that young women should be able to be as free as young men makes him interesting.

I visited the Morgan a few years ago and loved it.

Thread🧵

👇

❤️

I gave directly, but I love how Steve’s always steps up.

We’re entering the home stretch!

Hmmm. Maybe my new year’s resolution will be to read a short story a month.

When Don Quixote saw himself in the open countryside, free and clear of Altisidora's wooing, it seemed to him that he had returned to his own element, that his spirits had revived and were ready to resume his chivalric pursuits, and turning to Sancho, he said:

Last week I forced myself to catch up with Don Quixote and was relieved he was finally free of the Duke and Duchess. So it was easier to sit down and read this week’s installment. 🫏

He agrees:

I loved that line too. And then Archer thinking that if she wanted a lover she would get one.

A visit to Me. Manson Mingott was alwavs an amusing episode to the young man. The house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire.

Why did I not know that Edith Wharton was so funny? I would have read her sooner.

And descriptive details … 🏹

yeah, on the first day that extra hour of sleep is nice. Then reality hits.

My least favorite day of the year, the day my SAD kicks onto full gear as the sun starts to go down at 4:00.

All so that kids don’t wait for the bus in the dark. For about a month and then they are in the dark anyway.

I don’t follow a lot of people but have multiple lists of people sorted by category. Archaeologists and Medievalists are the only people not doing baseball tonight.

Well, that’s a bummer F’ing Dodgers again. But great series.

Here’s an analysis of that first chapter that I found.
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Redhaired woman in a pink dress, lots of decolletage. She is wearing a pearl necklace and hold a furled fan. On the dress is a corsage.

Chapter one reminds me of this Mary Cassatt painting of a woman in a box at the Paris Opera with a mirror behind her. She is looking out. In the mirror you can see the people in the other boxes looking at her, not at the stage.

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I looked it up and apparently the Opera is Gounod’s Faust. Although Archer isn’t paying much attention to it (it’s not the “thing” to pay attention) he clearly knows the opera.

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I think I’m going to enjoy The Age of Innocence. 🏹

October 2025 Reading Book reviews, TV reviews and general culture discussion

In October I read two more Booker shortlisted novels - I loved The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai but wasn't much taken with Flashlight by Susan Choi. I also read the new Louise Penny mystery and the new Richard Osman mystery. And others.
Full thoughts in my blog. #booksky

No kidding.

How was that ball “lodged” when he eventually picked it up and threw it in? MLB in the tank for the Dodgers.

What a bogus call.

There’s not much I miss about Xitter but I do miss seeing pics of Adam Wainwright and his family in costume for Halloween. #StlCards

Great conversation. I’ve never read VF and didn’t have on my TBR but now I do. Maybe next year.